OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 is an incremental update to OpenShift Enterprise 1.0, which was released at the end of November 2012. OpenShift is Red Hat's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform and the Enterprise edition is for on-site private deployments. Red Hat also has the open source OpenShift Origin project and the OpenShift online effort as well.

Ashesh Badani, GM of the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat, explained to ServerWatch that his company has added a few key items in the OpenShift Enterprise 1.1 release.

"Traditional enterprise software release cycles are anywhere from six months to 18 months," Badani said. "With OpenShift, we're on a very agile development cycle and internally we're on a three-week cycle."

While Red Hat iterates very rapidly internally, enterprise software adoption cycles are not quite that rapid. Red Hat spends time on quality assurance and testing for the stable enterprise release as well as interoperability with other development tools.

"In OpenShift Enterprise 1.1, there has been a whole bunch of work done on stability and testing," Badani said. "There have also been a bunch of security patches and bug fixes."

Additionally, the OpenShift web console has now been fully productized and is no longer considered to be a technology preview. The web interface enables administrators to more easily manage and deploy applications.

Badani explained that the administrator now just has to pull up the web console interface, define the application type and the container it should be run in, provide the database connection and then click the check box for autoscaling.

"From a usability perspective, the web console opens up OpenShift Enterprise to a lot more folks than just those that want to work with command-line tools," Badani said.

While the OpenShift Enterprise 1.0 release had the web console as a technology preview, Badani said that there is no new technology preview items in the 1.1 release.

"For OpenShift Enterprise 1.2, which you should expect to see in the next three to six months, [there will be] some new technology," Badani said.

For Red Hat, the need to evolve the PaaS platform is balanced by the need to provide enterprises with a degree of stability. That said, Red Hat is still heavily investing in evolving OpenShift for scalability, performance and additional functionality.

"We want to give enterprises new features and make sure they have a cutting-edge platform, while at the same time making sure that we have the ability to support it over a longer time frame," Badani said.

Integration with OpenStack

Red Hat's complete cloud portfolio also includes the CloudForms orchestration technology as well as an OpenStack cloud platform.

"People want to use OpenShift in a variety of different environments -- some want to use bare metal and some want to use it on virtualized environments," Badani said. "We have seen interest on running OpenShift on OpenStack as well."

Badani said that Red Hat is now working on the interaction points between OpenShift and OpenStack.

"There are a lot of people that are looking at OpenStack that also want to make sure they have an open and flexible Platform-as-a-Service offering that can run on it," Badani said. "We think there is a really sweet synergy between the work that Red Hat is doing on OpenStack and the traction that we're seeing with OpenShift."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.